According to horror exegetes, Bernard Rose’s Candyman is a parable about race, class, and gender in America: Helen (Virginia Madsen), a grad student studying urban legends, is punished because she’s a woman who intrudes upon a male realm (academe), and/or a middle-class Caucasian who intrudes upon an underclass African-American realm (Chicago’s Cabrini-Green project). Such readings miss the point! Instead, Candyman ought to be read as a mashup of Sidney Hayers’s 1962 horror movie Burn Witch Burn, in which a Psychology professor who explains away witchcraft as superstition is tormented by what might be witchcraft, and (in a first-time-as-farce, second-time-as-tragedy way) Frederick Crews’s 1963 parody The Pooh Perplex, a collection of exegetical essays — by fictitious Marxist, Freudian, Christian, Leavisite, and Fiedlerian literary critics — on the topic of Winnie-the-Pooh. The uneasy embrace, in the early scene shown here, between Helen and her husband, a Sociology professor who explains away urban legends as superstructural phenomena, foreshadows the uncanny, Todorovian “fantastique”-type state into which Helen and we will be drawn; like Rose’s earlier movie Paperhouse, this one teeters between realist and supernatural modes. Candyman is a parable about interpretation; its unmentionable boogeyman is hermeneutic vertigo.

PS: Virginia Madsen’s character in this movie must have been the inspiration for Gillian Anderson’s Dana Scully in The X-Files. Her hairdo, her sardonic smile! Who’s with me?

PPS: Below, blackboard scenes from Candyman and Burn Witch Burn.

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An occasional series analyzing some of the author’s favorite moments in the positioning or movement of actors in a movie.

A. Not with you on the Gillian thing. Sorry. B. The original Clive Barker short story set in Britain could open up some spaces for UK horror fans to comment on. The American filmic treatment of this story loses the depth of the source matter to me.